“Most of them do. My mother spoke French and Spanish. Picked them up around home from her parents, as I did from her. After I went to sea, I stopped in Madagascar four years, and then went to Mauritius and Indochina.”
“You were here during the war?”
“Part of the time. When it started, I was in Tananarive; but I returned here, got away from the Boche, and fought with the Maquis for a while. Then I came back to Paris.”
He looked up at me and the slate-gray eyes were flat and ugly. “My girl was dead.”
“Bombs?”
“No. A Vichy rat.”
He would say nothing more on the subject and our talk drifted to a strange and little-known people who live in and atop a mountain in Madagascar, and their peculiar customs. I, too, had followed the sea for a time so there was much good talk of the ways of ships and men.
Tomas was without education in the accepted sense, yet he had observed well and missed little. He had read widely. His knowledge of primitive peoples would have fascinated an anthropologist and he had appreciation and understanding for their beliefs.
After talking with him, I came more often to the café, for we found much in common. His cynical toughness appealed to me, and we had an understanding growing from mutual experiences and interests. Yet as our acquaintance grew, I came to realize that he was a different man when we talked together alone than when others were in the room. Then his manner changed. He became increasingly watchful, talked less and only in French.
The man was watching for someone or something. Observing without seeming to, I became aware the center of his interests were those who came most often to the café. And of these, there were four that held his attention most.
Mombello was a slender Italian of middle years who worked in a market. Picard was a chemist, and Leon Matsys owned a small iron foundry on the edge of Paris and a produce business near The Halles. Matsys was a heavy man who had done well, had educated himself, and was inclined to tell everyone so. Jean Mignet, a sleek, catlike man, was supported by his wife, an actress of sorts. He was pleasant enough to know, but I suspected him of being a thief.
Few women came to the café. Usually the girls who came to the hotel entered by the other door and went to the chambers above, and after a period of time, returned through the same door. To us, they existed merely as light footsteps in the dark hall and on the stairs.
Madame herself, a friendly, practical Breton woman, was usually around and occasionally one of the daughters Mombello would come in search of their father.
The oldest was eighteen and very pretty, but businesslike, without interest in the men of the café. The younger girl was thin, woefully thin from lack of proper food, but a beautiful child with large, magnificent dark eyes, dark wavy hair, and lips like the petals of a flower.
Someone among these must be the center of interest, yet I could not find that his interest remained long with any one of the four men. For their part, they seemed to accept him as one of themselves. Only one, I think, was conscious of being watched. That one was Jean Mignet.
On another of those dismal afternoons, we sat alone in the café and talked. (It always seemed that I came there only when the outside was bleak and unhappy, for on the sunny days, I liked being along the boulevards or in St. Germain.) The subject again arose of strange superstitions and unique customs.
There was a Swede on one of my ships who would never use salt when there was a Greek at the table, an idea no more ridiculous than the fear some people have of eating fish and drinking milk in the same meal.
Tomas nodded. “I’ve known of many such ideas,” he said, “and in some of the old families you will find customs that have been passed along from generation to generation in great secrecy for hundreds of years.
“I know of one”—he hesitated, describing circles on the dark tabletop with the wet bottom of his glass—“that is, a religious custom followed so far as I know by only one family.”
He looked up at me. “You must never speak of this around here,” he said, and he spoke so sharply and with so much feeling, I assured him I’d never speak of it anywhere, if he so wished.
“In the family of my girl,” he said, “there is an ancient custom that goes back to the Crusades. Her ancestor was a soldier with Saint Louis at Saint-Jean d’Acre; no doubt you know more of that than I do. Anyway, when his brother was killed in the fighting, there was no shrine or church nearby, so he thrust his dagger into a log. As you know, the hilts of daggers and swords were at that time almost always in the form of a cross, and he used it so in this case, burning a candle before the dagger.
“It became the custom of a religious and fighting family, and hence whenever there is a death, this same dagger is taken from its wrappings of silk and with the point thrust into wood, a candle for the dead is burned before it.
“Marie told me of this custom after her mother’s death when I came hurriedly into her room and surprised her with the candle burning. For some forgotten reason, a tradition of secrecy had grown around the custom, and no one outside the family ever knew of it.
“That night in the darkened room, we watched the candle slowly burn away before that ancient dagger, a unique dagger where on crosspiece or guard was carved the body of Christ upon the cross and the blade was engraved with the figure of a snake, the snake signifying the powers of evil fallen before God.
“I never saw the dagger again while she lived. It was put away among her things, locked carefully in an iron chest, never to be brought out again until, as she said, she herself died, or her brother. Then, she looked at me, and said, ‘Or you, Tomas, for you are of my family now.’ ”
He looked at me, and underneath the scarred brows, there were tears in his eyes.
“She must have been a fine girl,” I said, for he was deeply moved.
“She was the only thing in my life! Only a madman, a mad American, would return to France after the war broke out. But I loved her.
“Look at me. I’m not the kind of man many women could love. I’m too rough, too brutal! I’m a seaman, that is all, and never asked to be more. A good man at sea or in a fight, but I have no words with which to say nice things to a woman, and she was a beautiful girl with an education.”
Tomas took out his wallet and removed a worn photograph. When I looked at it, I was frankly astonished. The girl was not merely a pretty girl, she was all he had said, and more. She was beautiful.
Furthermore, there was something in her eyes and face that let you know that here was a girl who had character, maybe one who knew what loyalty was.
“She is lovely,” I said sincerely. “I never saw anyone more beautiful!”
He was pleased, and he looked at me with his face suddenly lighter. “She was magical!” he said. “The best thing in my life. I came first to her house with her brother, who had been my shipmate on a voyage from Saigon. She was a child then, and I thought of her as nothing else.
“So, when next I came to the house, I brought her a present from Liverpool, and then others from Barcelona and Algiers. Simple things, and inexpensive, the sort of things a sailor may find in almost any port, but they had romance, I suppose, a color.
“I gave them simply because I was a lonely man, and this family had taken me as one of them, and because the giving of things is good for a lonely heart.
“One day—she was twelve then, I think—she had gone to a theater in the Boulevard de Clichy with her brother, and when they came out, she saw me with a girl, a girl from a café in the Pigalle. She was very angry and for days she would not speak to me.
“Her brother teased her, and said, ‘Look! Marie thinks already she is a woman! She is jealous for you, Tomas!’ ”
He smiled at the memory. “Then, I was gone again to sea, and when I came again to the house, Marie was fourteen, taller, frightened, and skinny. Always she stared at me, and I br
ought her presents as before. Sometimes I took her to the theater, but to me she was a child. She was no longer gay, full of excitement and anger. She walked beside me very seriously.
“Four years then I was gone, and when I returned…you should have seen her! She was beautiful. Oh, I tell you, she was a woman now, and no doubt about it.
“I fell in love! So much that I could not talk for feeling it, but never did I think for a moment that it could matter.
“But did I have a choice? Not in the least! She had not changed, that one. She was both the little girl I knew first and the older one I knew later, and more besides. She laughed at me and said that long ago she had made up her mind that I was to be her man, and so it was to be whether I liked it or not! Me, I liked it. She was so much of what I wanted that she frightened me.
“Can you imagine what that did to me, m’sieu? I was a lonely man, a very lonely man. There had been the girls of the ports, but they are not for a man of soul, only for the coarse-grained who would satisfy the needs of the moment. Me, I wanted love, tenderness.
“I know.” He shrugged. “I don’t look it. I am a sailor and pleased to be one, and I’ve done my share of hard living. More than once, I’ve twisted my knife in the belly of a man who asked for it, and used my boots on them, too. But who is to say what feeling lives in the heart of a man? Or what need for love burns inside him?
“My parents died when I was young and the sea robbed me of my country. In such a life, one makes no close friends, no attachments, puts down no roots. Then, this girl, this beautiful girl, fell in love with me.
“Fell in love? No, I think the expression is wrong. She said she had always loved me even when she was a child and too young to know what it meant.
“Her mother and brother approved. They were good people, and I had lived long among them. Then the mother died, Pierre was away in the colonies, and Marie and I were to be married when he returned. So we lived together.
“Is this wrong? Who is to say what is right and what is wrong? In our hearts we understood and in France, well, they understand such things. What man is to live without a girl? Or a girl without a man?
“Then away I went to sea on my last trip, and while I was gone, the war came, and with it the Germans. When I returned, I joined the Maquis to get back into France. Her letters were smuggled to me.
“Marie? She was a French girl, and she worked with the underground. She was very skillful, and very adept at fooling the Boche. Then, something happened.
“One of the men close to her was betrayed, then another; finally, it was her brother who was killed. The Gestapo had them, but they died without talking. One night I came to her to plead that she come away with me. It had been three years that I had fought in the underground; for her, almost six. But she told me she could not go, that someone close to her was working with the Nazis, someone who knew her. She must stay until she knew who it was.
“Yet try as she could, there was no clue. The man was shrewd, and a very devil. He finally came to her himself, after her brother was caught. He told her what he knew of her underground activities and of mine. He told her unless she came to live with him that I would be tortured and killed.
“He had spied upon her. He had even discovered her burning the candle before the dagger for Pierre after he was killed. He told her of it, to prove how much he knew—to prove he knew enough to find me—and she had admitted the reason.
“In the letter in which all this was told, she could not tell me who he was. He had friends in the underground, and she was fearful that learning who she was writing about, they would destroy the letter if they saw his name, and then she would be cut off from me and from all help.
“She would give me his name, she said, when I came next to Paris. He had not forced himself on her, just threatened. We had to plan to do away with him quickly. Marie said, too, that she was afraid that if the invasion came, he would kill her, for she alone could betray him; she alone knew of his activities for the Nazis.
“The invasion a secret? Of course! But when orders began to come for the underground, come thick and fast, we knew it was coming. Then, the landings were made, and for days we were desperately busy.
“We rose in Paris, and they were exciting, desperate days, and bitter days for the collaborators and the men of Vichy. Their servitude to the Nazis had turned to bitterness and gall; they fled; and they begged, and they died.
“When I could, I hurried to the flat where Marie lived. It was near here, just around the corner. I found her dying. She had been raped and shot by this collaborator two days before and she had crawled to her apartment to wait for me. She died telling me of it, but unable before her last breath to give me his name.”
“And there was no way you could figure out who he was?” I asked.
“How?” He spread his hands expressively. “No one suspected him. His desire for her was such that he had threatened her, and in threatening her he had boasted of what he had done. That was a mistake he rectified by killing her.
“Only one thing I know. He is one of our little group here. She said he lived in this neighborhood, that he was waiting here more than once when he accosted her. He thinks himself safe now. My girl has been dead for some time and her body buried. She is never mentioned here.
“Mombello? He is an Italian. Picard is a chemist, and has had traffic with Germany since the twenties. Matsys? An iron foundry owner who retained it all through the war, but who was active in the underground, as were Picard and Mignet.”
We were interrupted then by some others coming into the café, yet now the evening had added zest. Here was a deadly bit of business. Over the next two hours, as they trooped in, I began to wonder. Which was he?
The slender, shrewd Mombello with his quick, eager eyes? That lean whip of a man, Mignet? The heavy Matsys with blue and red veins in his nose, and the penchant for telling you he’d seen it all and done it all? Or was it dry, cold Picard who sipped wine through his thin lips and seemed to have ice water for blood?
Which man was marked to die? How long would Tomas sit brooding in his corner, waiting? What was he waiting for? A slip of the tongue? A bit of drunken talk?
None of these men drank excessively. So which one? Mombello whose eyes seemed to gloat over the body of every woman he saw? Mignet with his lust for money and power and his quick knife? Or big affable Matsys? Or Picard with his powders and acids?
How long would he wait? These five had sat here for months, and now…now there were six. I was the sixth. Perhaps it was the sixth to tip the balance. Here they were caught in a pause before death. Yet the man who killed such a girl, and who betrayed his country, should not go free. There was a story in this, and it had an ending, somewhere.
Over the following gray days, several in a row, the conversation ebbed and flowed and washed around our ears. I did not speak privately to Tomas again but there seemed an ongoing, silent communication between us. Then, in a quiet moment of discussion, someone mentioned the bazooka, and it came to me then that another hand had been dealt…mine.
“A strange weapon,” I agreed, and then moved the tide of conversation along the subject of weapons and warfare. I spoke of the first use of poison gas by soldiers of Thebes when they burned sulfur to drive defenders from the walls of Athenian cities, then to the use of islands of defense, a successful tactic by the Soviets in this war, previously used by the Russians defending themselves against Charles XII of Sweden.
Then other weapons and methods, and somehow, but carefully, to strange knives.
Tomas ignored me, the spider in his web, but he could hear every word and he was poised, poised for anything.
Mignet told of a knife he had seen in Algiers with a poisoned barb in the hilt near the blade, and Mombello of a Florentine dagger he had once seen.
Tomas stayed silent, turning his glass in endless circles upon the table before h
im, turning, turning, turning. We locked eyes for a moment and before he looked away he seemed to sigh and give a nearly imperceptible nod.
“There was a knife I saw once,” I said suddenly, “with engraving on it. A very old knife, and very strange. A figure of Christ on the cross rose above a fallen snake. The religious symbolism is interesting. I’d never seen its like before, the worksmanship was so finely wrought.”
A moment passed, a bare breath of suspended time….
“It was not the only one, I think,” Leon Matsys said. “Odd things; they were used in some custom dating back to the Crusades.”
He looked up, about to say more, then slowly the life went from his face. He was looking at Tomas, and Tomas was smiling.
Jean Mignet’s eyes were suddenly alive. He did not know, but he suspected something. He was keen, that one.
Leon Matsys’s face was deathly pale. He was trapped now, trapped by those remarks that came so casually from his lips. In the moment he had certainly forgotten what they might imply, and could not know that it would matter. He looked to one side and then the other, and then he started to take a drink.
He lifted the glass, then suddenly put it down. He got up, and his face was flabby and haunted by terror. He seemed unable to take his eyes from Tomas.
I glanced at Tomas, and my muscles jumped involuntarily. He had the ancient knife in his hand and was drawing his little circles with its point.
Matsys turned and started for the entrance, stumbling in his haste. The glass in the tall door rattled as it slammed closed, leaving only a narrow view of the dimly lit street.
After a moment Tomas pushed his chair back and got up and his step was very light as he also went out the door.
A FRIEND OF THE GENERAL
While I was in France, my company was stationed for a while in a château not far outside Chartres. The girl who owned the château, a countess, was living in the gardener’s cottage. Which, if you had it in Beverly Hills it would sell for half a million dollars anyway and probably more. It was a beautiful place. She had quite a bunch of friends around, an international group, you know, and a very exciting crowd.
Yondering: Stories Page 17